Telecommunication service providers typically purchase licenses for the software that runs on their telecommunication equipment. For example, a telecommunication system typically includes a plurality of network elements under the control of a network element controller. The network elements contain hardware, such as processors, that can provide telecommunication services. Each network element is designed to handle a certain amount of calls. In addition, network elements typically include redundant resources, such as redundant processors that can provide processing capabilities in the event of a failure in the system.
Software can be licensed in different ways. For example, licensing can be done on a per processor basis. In this embodiment, all processors in the network element must have a license to use the software. This includes any processors that are provided for redundancy purposes. From a customer standpoint, per processor based licensing is typically undesirable because the customer needs to buy extra licenses to cover redundant equipment.
Another way of licensing software is by capacity licensing. In typical capacity licensing schemes, a capacity license covers a maximum capacity of software use. For example, a capacity license may cover a number of calls the network element can process, a maximum number of users that can access the network element, or a maximum amount of network traffic the network element can handle. If a network element fails, other network elements can pick up the extra traffic if the other network elements have any available licensed capacity. If the network element does not have enough licensed capacity, the network element could not assume any more traffic, even if the network element has redundant processing capabilities that could handle the traffic. While this lack of licensed capability can be avoided by purchasing enough license capacity to cover all of the hardware in the network element, this forces the customer to purchase licenses for redundant resources.
Additionally, in current capacity license schemes a central platform or controller is needed to monitor the compliance with the license as well as distribute the licensed capacity. For example, in a telecommunication environment the element manager manages the capacity license for all network elements. Monitoring at the element manager level requires extra programming and uses up resources of the element manager. What is needed is distributed redundancy capacity licensing in a telecommunication network element.